For 3rd time … Irish v. Huskies

UConn is 1-7 the last two seasons against Notre Dame and Baylor, and the Huskies are 62-1 against everyone else they have played.

Geno Auriemma looked beat up and demoralized during the press conference after the loss at Notre Dame, but he quickly gained a lot of perspective from the loss.

He said the entire team has, and the Huskies have worked diligently to refocus and improve.

Perhaps it is time for the trend to change.

“I sense there is a little bit more of an urgency with this team right now,” Auriemma said. “There seems to be more of a ‘We’ve got to get it right, right now,’ as opposed to ‘We will go back home and get it.’ Obviously, we are not the Big East regular season champions this year. But coming back from that Notre Dame game wasn’t all doom and gloom either. We turned the ball over 35 times and missed free throws, and it took three overtimes for us to lose. So we must have done a bunch of things really well. So we’ve just tried to stress those things that we did really well and tried to build on them. It worked.”

Roger’s analysis of final

Disappearing act: The Huskies’ best player this season, Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis, hasn’t been immune to long periods of tentative play when it comes to the big games. In last week’s game at Notre Dame, she went a span of 15 minutes, 24 seconds without scoring a point in the second half.

She preceded that with a scoreless span of almost 13 minutes against Baylor. The fact that she scored 26 points in each of those games and played very well overall doesn’t serve as much of a consolation to her. She sees how good she has become, but she expects more out of herself.

“I feel like I am making strides, but the strides need to be faster,” Mosqueda-Lewis said. “The strides need to be bigger. In order for me to make that change, it is going to have to be a conscious effort every single day for me. I can’t disappear for even two minutes in practice. Because in a game, it is going to be tougher, and it is going to turn into 15 minutes instead of two.”

She said she still hasn’t been able to put her finger on what is causing her to disappear even in games when she is having a lot of success scoring overall.

“I literally can’t explain it right now,” Mosqueda-Lewis said. “It is something I am trying to figure out myself whether it is being content, whether it is doubt, whether it is just freezing. I don’t know what it is right now. I definitely believe I can do it. I just need to make sure I can do it on a consistent basis.”